home
by Jeiq
Summary: Two people who knew Spike Siegel meet, many years post-Bebop, to talk about him. EDIT: updated.
1. going to your funeral

This is... a post-Bebop story, without much action or excitement, and perhaps too much melancholy. In it, two people who have never met before come together to discuss Spike Siegel, his effect on their lives, and why they each think he did what he did. 

  
_ going to your funeral / and feeling I could scream   
everything fades away.   
look at all the people with / their faces in their hands   
when everything I'm feeling makes it hard to understand   
that was once / that was once / you.   
--The Eels 'going to your funeral' _

  
** HOME : 1 going to your funeral **

  
Outside her window, sometimes, looking at the city through a fog heavy with grime and dust, city-tears never cried, she smokes a cigarette until it's only a few inches long, then she stubs it out in the glass ashtray on the windowsill. 

She's not doing anything dangerous, now. An accountant from an office somewhere in the City calls her from time to time, tells her how her accounts are during. His voice is like a boy's voice, but cool, professional; he switches between her, a director in a Zurich bank, another director in a New Valha bank, important people scattered all over the universe. Sometimes she calls him and listens, and then she gives him directions, tells him what to buy and what to shift to where. 

Most of the time she just sits in her apartment, which is not an expensive apartment, just nice enough that nobody gets murdered near it and the lifts work most of the time and she doesn't get bums or salesmen or other weird people knocking on her door. She has a big-screen TV on the walls that's never turned on, a little gym full of exercise equipment that she goes through for exactly the same amount of time every day, a stereo system that never plays any music, a computer that's hardly ever out of idle mode. She goes through a lot of cigarettes and sometimes a beeper on her belt goes off, that's when she knows she ought to call her doctor and go to see him, get a new pair of lungs. But most of the time she just sits and smokes and watches the smoke drift away. 

It drifts so slowly. 

Today the military man came again. She watched him the other day, when she first saw him; when the bell rang, the security monitor flicked in and faded out from black, melting into an unfamiliar face standing in front of the apartment's front door, one hand raised to knock on the wood. 

"Miss Black?" 

She never answers the doorbell or the knocker, never says anything. Sometimes she watches the monitor, but usually she turns it off. When the military man turned away without saying anything she watched him go, the back of his head made a strange aerodynamic shape by the sweep of his short hair, shoulders stiff and slim under the heavy black uniform. She didn't recognise his face. The security computer, when she'd asked it, said he was research personnel, stationed somewhere nearby, but she hadn't recognised the name that it spat out along with the rest of its datafeed. A young man's face; no one she knew. Maybe he'd been a boy, and she'd passed him by, swooped over his small head and made him look up and gape at the roar of her engines, full throttle and forward-gone to the horizon... but those days were more like dreams, now, the dust of them choking her in her sleep and waking her up, rubbing at tearing eyes. 

The other day she stood in the bathroom with a line of dancer in her hand, watching the yellow drug crumble to a powder on the floor, knowing the little robots that lived in the wooden panelling would come out after she'd gone and sweep it all up nice and clean, and not tell her servants or staff anything. She'd looked at it and it had seemed so heavy and neat in her hand, and she had realised how easy it would be to snort the whole line and lie down on the bathroom floor, like in the song, and she'd be that, 'elizabeth on the bathroom floor' like the man sang it in the song, on her way to a place where she'd be always high... 

But she'd put it away, in the end, and when she felt her hand creeping towards the bathroom cabinet, where she'd stashed it behind the toothpaste, she'd made herself pick it up and flush it down the toilet. She hadn't asked her pharmacist to sneak her any more, after that. It was too much to have just lying around. 

She'd looked at the knives in the kitchen and the razor blades in the bathroom cabinet with a little bit more caution, after that, but in the end there was never any need to get rid of them. When she looks out of her window, at the smoke wafting out of her mouth, she knows why; but she can never put it in words to explain to herself, and she's never really satisfied. 

And then the military man returns again, today, and he doesn't call her Miss Black, and he doesn't try to say who he is. 

He just stands on the doorstep, rings the doorbell, then with his hands held stiff behind his back he says, "I am going to visit his grave today. It should be fifteen years now... If you would come and speak, a little, I would be grateful for your company." 

He leeaves after that. He is not wearing his black jacket, because the weather is now so warm, here on Mars; and, as he walks away, she thinks she sees, through the white cotton of the back of his shirt, the ripple of a dark tattoo on his back. The head and snarl and curve and twist of a dragon... 

She dresses in black, and takes an automatic car to the cemetery. There's a gun in her hand that she hasn't used for years. It's old but she cleans it as good as she ever did and she knows it'll still fire if she wants it to. 

It's cold underneath her jacket, like it's sleeping. Cold and quiet. She wonders if it will wake up again. If she will ever wake up again, too. It's been so long since life didn't feel like one of those long, aching, tiresome dreams you have, where you wish and wish and wish you'd wake up because nothing's happening, nothing at all, and you don't know yet how long the night's still got to go. 

The sky is scattered, pale blue and stark white and clouds shot through with dazzling sunlight; magnolia trees shiver and the thin fragrance of their soft white flowers comes down the slope, hovers in the air. At the heads of green mounds the tombstones in the cemetery gleam, freshly-scrubbed by recent-fallen rain, and the ground is damp underfoot, the grass a richer, darker feel and shade of green. 

She walks across it, going straight to that place where the military man stands with his back to her, looking at the headstone of one grave. 


	2. kimi no tame ni dekiru koto

In which they seek to understand why the man would never have been able to live after it was over, the way they are doing now. I don't know if there's anything to continue, after this; maybe we'll go see how Jet is doing. 

  
_ soba ni iru / sore wa boku no /   
kimi no tame ni dekiru koto   
'Staying nearby; that is   
what I can do for you.'   
--Gackt, 'Kimi No Tame Ni Dekiru Koto' _

  
** HOME 2 : kimi no tame ni dekiru koto **

  
It is a cold morning and the blue of the sky makes the man's head ache. There are no words on this tombstone, no plain-framed monochrome photograph placed in front of it; the grass in front of it grows without obstruction. His hands are empty, cold as they hang by his side. 

He hears the woman, walking over the grass to where he stands. When he turns and looks at her he thinks, she has not grown very old; her hair still black, glowing dangerously with violent shimmer where the light touches it, her face still sharp-chinned and smooth-skinned. He sees himself reflected in the enormous sunglasses that hide her eyes; his face is also young, younger than even hers. 

"Miss Black," he says. 

"What do I call you?" she asks. 

"Officially, I am Lieutenant Colonel Feng Shin Chen," the military man says. "But, officially, you are not Miss Jane Black; and so neither am I really a man called Chen." 

"But you _are_ in the army." 

"I had nothing else to do," he says. 

She looks at the grave, then away. 

"Where were you, that day?" she asks. 

"In a cryogenic hold. It was as if they knew it would happen. As if they were planning for my future..." 

"Who?" 

"The Van. The leaders of the Red Dragon. Perhaps they did not plan enough for themselves. Perhaps they decided that it was good enough that the Red Dragon should go on. Perhaps. I will never know. They did not tell me, when they woke me up; they left no message for me. Only a brief letter, and numbers of bank accounts; and a new name, to remake myself with." 

"I've never seen you before," the woman says. 

"I've never seen _you_ before," the military man says. "But you knew him. You worked with him. After he left us, he was on a ship, and you were there, too. I have the names in my head - Faye Valentine, Jet Black, and a hacker called Edward." 

"And a dog called Ein." 

The military man angles his head. His features are sharp, and his irises brilliant green, startling to see in the narrow slant of his eyes. When he smiles it is only for a moment, but the woman feels a brief regret to see it disappear so quickly. Without his smile he looks like any other cold man, a killer in uniform, a scientist in a suit... 

"Yet I don't know anything about you," the woman says. 

"You checked the military database for my records." 

"Not Lieutenant Colonel Chen," the woman says. "I found out a lot about Chen. He's boring. Good officer, stellar biochemist, bright future; where's the excitement in that? No, I don't want to know about Lieutenant Colonel Chen. I'd rather know about the boy that the Dragons decided was so important they had to freeze him, until the trouble was over. Who was that boy? And what did this... what does this grave mean, to you, that you'd come back after it's all over? You can't do anything about it, any more..." 

"He was my teacher," the military man replies. "I came to pay my respects. I wasn't there when I should have been, but then again, he wasn't there when he should have been, either." 

He looks at the woman, and there is that smile again, but so sad, now; the same uplift of lips, but without humour or joy or mirth. 

"I have found," he says. "That there is truly no one to blame for anything. It is only people who need to carry out revenge; only we who decide that someone else must suffer, because we have suffered." 

"But there is a cause for everything," the woman says. 

"Yes," the military man says, "there is. It is ourselves. It is he who kissed her and changed that part of their lives; he who left us; he who found you, and he who left his friends, once again. It is I who stayed, I who obeyed, I who took the bullet; it is you who joined them, you who stayed with them, then, later, you who decided to go on. When other people do something, that is nothing; it is you who reacts to it. People do things to other people all the time. What we decide to do; that is what happens. Where were _you_, that day?" 

The woman touches the brim of her hat, as the wind brushes by. A family places flowers at the head of a grave, further down the hill; she wonders at how colourful they seem, toy figures brightly dresed against the green, then she wonders what she and the military man must look like, sober black-suited figures high and lonely on this hill. 

"It doesn't matter," she says. "I remember. But it doesn't matter. Nothing has really mattered, since then. Nothing has seemed as real as it did, in those days." 

"Yes," the military man says. "It seems to be more real, in a way; it is less fantastic, more normal, with things like regular sleep and coffee in the morning and a house key in your pocket. But it is hard to remember where the time goes to. To distinguish between the weeks, as they go past..." 

"When did they freeze you?" 

"Sixteen years ago. I was very badly injured. They were going to wake me up later, because they wanted someone to believe I was dead. After they killed him, they would have woken me up... or, if he killed them, then the doctors had orders to wake me up at a good time, after he was gone. But then it happened... and the doctors decided it would be better to wait a while." 

"Who was that?" 

"Vicious-sama." 

"Ah..." 

"He killed Spike-san." 

"Yes, I know." 

"You are angry with him?" 

"Yes." 

"It has been fifteen years..." 

"It is remembered," the woman says. 

"And Spike-san? What do you feel, for him?" 

"I am also angry with him." 

"But he is dead," the military man says. 

"He could have stayed," she says. "He didn't have to go back. I have never gone back. Just moved on. It is empty... But it is better than being dead. The past cannot be changed no matter what you do. Why cause so many others to die and be hurt, instead of moving on, changing, finding a way to be happier?" 

"That is the danger in finding your dreams realised, too early in life," the military man says. "When he was with us, when I was a little boy - he had already found what he was searching for. After he had left us, I think, perhaps, he realised that nothing could be as it was before - that he could not have her and have Vicious-sama, both, as he had in those days before Vicious-sama realised - and that made him a little too eager to die. That he could not have again what he had before..." 

He looked up at the sky, a giddy blue, streaming tatters of clouds. He is young and strong and tall, his cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, hair cut short and teased into scruffy spikes. On his shoulders there are stripes of rank, a few medals lined up on the breast-pocket of his blazer; a scar, healing, lines the knuckles of one hand, an earring pierces the lobe of his left ear. There is a ring on the middle finger of his right hand, a silver chain around his neck, tucked beneath his jacket. All of these signs, the woman sees; all of them, signs of the life he leads, a normal life, the drama of it nothing next to the explosive action of his old one, but still life - still heady with joy, still plagued by disasters and challenges, still places to go and people to meet and things to do. 

"You've moved on," she says. 

"The Van would have wanted me to revive the Red Dragons," he says. "I did consider it. It was possible, and I am not a disloyal follower... But it is not a good time. Perhaps later, perhaps soon, perhaps never. For now, I am happy." 

"It is very different from the life you had before, isn't it?" she asks. "Sometimes I wonder if staying was the right thing to do. He might have been right, you know. Sometimes when your dreams have died, maybe it's better to go out with them." 

"Why not just look for new dreams to dream?" the military man says. 

He turns away from the grave, his movements smart, precise, and offers her his arm. She takes it, feels the muscle of it, lean and hard, and says, "He must have trained you for a long time. You move exactly like he did." 

"Yes," the man says. "He did. I loved him, very much. Did you?" 

She looks at him. He has a lean face, a handsome face, but it also carries the innocence of a child's... 

"He was a special person," she says. 

They stop at her car, and she disengages her arm from his; feels alone again, although he is still there. It is so different, to have touched someone, then to be in contact with nothing more remarkable than the earth beneath your feet once more. You feel the need to reach out and touch them again. But sometimes, a great tragedy happens, and they will not always there. 

Is that why Spike went back, in the end? After his dream-woman died, did he feel that he had no one to reach out and hold, ever again? Because, after _he_ died... 

"Dream new dreams," the military man says. 

He smiles at her, a quick, shy flash of teeth. 

"What's your true name?" she asks. 

"Lin," he says. "But Lin died, on a rooftop in Callisto." 

"Chen, then," she says. "Lieutenant Colonel Chen. Will you call me again, another day?" 

"Of course." 

The car pulls away, and the military man leaves, going back to his lab, his home, his friends; a life resumed, at a slower pace. The woman watches him in her rear-view mirror. It is strange, she thinks; you can live so carefree and casual until you meet someone who leaves so deep an impression upon you that you spend the rest of your life searching for a presence as powerful as his. 

Head leaning back on the soft leather of the seat, she falls asleep, falls into dream; dreaming, maybe, new dreams, a new day to wake up to after tonight. 


End file.
